IMO, this illustrates a major problem with the current approach to Covid vaccine research.<p>With most vaccines on the market, the effect of vaccination according to the recommended schedule is tested for real: actual disease outcomes are studied and the vaccine schedule is determined accordingly. For example, people who get both measles vaccine doses largely don’t get measles (and largely is quantified). People who get two doses of the chickenpox vaccine don’t get chickenpox [0].<p>With the Covid vaccines, for some reason public health authorities are okay with flying blind. The effect of, say, bivalent boosters on their recipients’ blood neutralizing viruses and virus-like imitation viruses are studied in the lab (but even the studies of this effect by the vaccine makers are barely public and seem to consist mostly of press releases). Studies on actual infections rates seem to be almost completely absent.<p>And now we have this study, which at least gives a plausible mechanism by which repeated mRNA vaccination could fail to improve actual immunity or maybe even reduce it.<p>What we need is a real study of whether vaccine recipients on different schedules <i>get sick</i> and <i>how sick</i>. And these need to be well designed, ongoing, and public.<p>For what it’s worth, IgG4 production is observed in allergy patients receiving immunotherapy, which consists essentially of very frequent repeated vaccination against allergens.<p>[0] The chickenpox vaccine is incredibly effective against chickenpox — it makes any of the Covid vaccines look pathetic. But, to be fair, the effect of chickenpox vaccination on shingles seems to only slowly coming in to focus by real studies. But to give the FDA credit, figuring this out takes multi-decade studies.
ELI5 : what does it mean in practice for vaccine and booster schedules ? Are we heading towards "no less than one booster every year" ? Or the contrary ? Would it change the frequency / severity of side effects with successive boosters ?<p>Basically, is it "good" news, "bad" news, or just, news ?<p>(To clarify in case that's what caused the downvotes : I'm not writing "bad" news because I think vaccines are "bad". If we really need to get boosted once a year, so be it - but it would arguably be a worse outcome than "not needing it")
Ok, well then it might turn out that some of the fringe scientists were right all along. A healthy young male like me would probably have been far better off to not receive any kind of vaccine, I only got Covid after a third booster and I don’t think I could have had it any worse.
Before everybody from the more esoteric communities chines in with some new reason why we all should immunize "naturally", let's not oversee that breakthrough infections were triggering the same effect.<p>Also, in general you don't want your immune system to be more aggressive/destructive than necessary when you consider having to rebuild tissue afterwards, which also might include more risks the older you get.<p>In the case if an infection not seeming life-threatening to your body, a softening of the overall reaction might actually just be the right path to persue. The question is whether we want that in this case or whether we want to further move that towards a more protective optimum in the future with these insights.<p>For the "I knew it" and "we should have waited" discussion, I personally prefer an early protection, even with a lower reaction, that still keeps me from being hospitalized over being nakedly exposed like we were in the early days of that pandemic. We might have forgotten about this with the current "mild" Omicron variant.<p>I would love to see the study include severe breakthrough infections, if there are any, to see if the dampening effect and antibody distribution would be different in these cases.
I found this paper to be less than objective in its introduction and commentary. Statements were made that had nothing to do with the research itself, and therefore did not relate to supporting data and were superfluous. I really don’t like reading papers like this because my initial reaction is always “why do they say this, and who reviewed the paper that allowed them to pass?”
Fwiw non-inflammatory antibodies could still incapacitate the virii when they attach to their spikes, if they are enough concentrated in the blood.<p>So, what about it? Is this effect powerful enough to be helpful?